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Hypersanity: An Essay Worth Your Consideration... [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-09-13
Are you going mad?
Do you feel your grip on sanity slipping away?
You are not alone. Neel Burton has this to share with us:
getpocket.com/…
“Many ‘normal’ people suffer from not being hypersane: they have a restricted worldview, confused priorities, and are wracked by stress, anxiety and self-deception. As a result, they sometimes do dangerous things, and become fanatics or fascists or otherwise destructive (or not constructive) people. In contrast, hypersane people are calm, contained and constructive. It is not just that the ‘sane’ are irrational but that they lack scope and range, as though they’ve grown into the prisoners of their arbitrary lives, locked up in their own dark and narrow subjectivity. Unable to take leave of their selves, they hardly look around them, barely see beauty and possibility, rarely contemplate the bigger picture – and all, ultimately, for fear of losing their selves, of breaking down, of going mad, using one form of extreme subjectivity to defend against another, as life – mysterious, magical life – slips through their fingers. “
Dr. Burton’s concept is a little bit slippery. I get accused of not being able to make things simple, so this will be a stretch for me, as well.
I’m going to ask you to be tolerant and patient. That is a big ask.
I’m also going to ask you to locate anger and disgust in your life. That is a HUGE ask.
I’m going to ask you to avoid scrolling or “speed reading.” You need to break through your resistance to information. We all have trouble with that. We all want to jump to the last page of the book, know how it ends, and move on.
Please, don’t.
Take the time necessary to let this idea wash over you. We are all moving through a mechanized, automated, speed-of-light world, but we are humans who are tied to a real world and a way of accomplishing that goes back to the beginning of our species.
I’m going to ask you to breathe. Now, do it again, but — let your exhale out very slowly.
Do this once more. Even slower.
Just keep breathing, be aware of that. Focus on it.
We cannot exist without breath. I wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be alive. Breath itself is what distinguishes us from that automated, electronic world we try to regulate and manage every day of our lives. With automation, it stops when you turn off the switch, or remove the power supply. But unlike a machine, you cannot be re-activated if you stop breathing.
Yes. We can engage CPR. We can revive you, but only if we get to you in a very short time period. The machine can wait infinitely, until power is restored appropriately. The machine will be and become whatever its user wants it to be.
You, however, are a unique, once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, no matter how you see yourself as “just like everyone else.” You are not “Close — but no cigar…”
Hypersanity is about slowing down your mind, just like the exercise we engaged in slowing down your breathing. It is about becoming clear on not a dozen goals, not on three or two or any multiple. It is about slowing down the eternal flood of ideas and constant curiosity.
It is about telling the brain, “Run my breathing. Run my heart. Observe the world, but make no decisions. Keep me alive.”
If this sounds like the method for stopping a panic attack, it is...
Hypersanity is about having knowledge of your self.
The ultimate knowledge of your self is in being fully aware of your breathing, your heart, your body and its movement, where you actually are in a physical sense. It is being alone in your self, not demanding, not requiring, not interacting, not joining with others.
It is a quiet, careful and patient process that helps empty your brain of everything other than that one necessary goal of keeping you alive, in the here and now.
Hypersanity is about having lived through some of your crazier episodes, not winding up dead, in jail, in a residential facility, permanently disabled or completely dependent on the goodwill of other humans.
You may have accomplished a few hair-raising adventures. You may have scared yourself senseless. You may have gone into the wild and discovered both danger and incredible beauty. You might have embarked on a soul-searching journey that took you to places where mystics, shamans, charlatans, fortune-tellers and other oracles made their attempts to engage a past-future-present nexus.
You might have tried psychedelics, and come back from the experience “clear.”
Maybe you have been through the grips of an addiction. Maybe Twelve Steps was your way of getting clear.
Maybe you explored deeper into your own religion, your own faith, read some of the lesser known chronicles that are part of it, discovered certain truths, hidden stories, some uglier aspects and come back with both doubts and understanding of how the faith got to be what it is today.
Maybe you had a motorcycle accident that damned near killed you.
Perhaps, you went through severe trauma, such as, a building collapsed on you and you were buried until rescuers could get to you.
Maybe you were caught in floodwaters, and you had to muster all your knowledge, skills and resources, save yourself and others.
Hypersane is a way of saying you had to spend time outside your normal envelope of activity, spend real time assessing your life, your wants, needs and what your focus is.
Hypersane is a place where money, measurement, quantity, personal drives and ambitions all go to die, leaving a person with the knowledge that they are still alive, in spite of shedding that husk of a materialistic self.
Here are the really important questions:
If you have attained hypersanity, if the molt truly has given you flight feathers, has it also stripped you of necessary qualities for being with and among your fellow humans, flawed as we all are?
In shedding the fluff of your earlier self, did you also lose compassion, empathy, kindness, insight and remorse?
Can you now look at another person, see them as creatures trying to accomplish what you have done, not be focused on how glistening and supple your own flight feathers are, and note that they, too, wish to move toward a hypersane plane of existence?
To be a leader of others, you need to know your own direction, and you do not need to have others follow you to get where you are going. Are you willing to take your own journey, even though others are not there with you?
You do not need to “sell” a sermon, theory, concept, gadget or worthless offering to have that following. Others will hear the beat of your wings and decide for themselves if that’s a journey worth taking. Does it matter to you that no one else has joined in?
Can you take time away from your pursuit, tend to the needs of others, maybe stay a little too long providing care, and then resume the journey?
No. I will not presume to have a single easy answer. No one person does. Many try the single-point process, only to become frustrated, despondent, and in the extreme, described as insane.
Each of us must carve a path through this life based on our skills, abilities, knowledge, curiosity, willingness to be part of a greater world. I’ve interacted with some incredibly gifted people, and I’ve also worked with a lot of not-so-capable persons.
I’ve known people who transited in and out of both polar opposites. I did not stop trying to be part of their existence, but I always could sense when our paths would diverge and we would no longer be compatible.
Pursue your own form of hypersanity. Locate that pursuit that doesn’t require you to congregate others, have them absorb your words like snack food at a tailgate party, hear you preach, then go out and do unjustifiable and often terrible things. Be involved in your own location of a healthy mind and a healthy body. Don’t be in a great hurry to dispense with advice that may be wrong. Also, look to your own protections. Don’t get too busy chasing down a hatred or a blind spot that you miss the rest of life, all that it holds, and the less plugged-in, more quiet actuality of being on this crazy, goofy, many times naturally violent planet.
It is out there. Go and find yours.
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